This Images Studio Captured the Beauty of Black Life within the South. Quickly Its Archive, As soon as Hidden Away, Will Have a New Museum Dwelling

The Hooks brothers documented life and pleasure in Memphis throughout the twentieth century. Their photos will probably be placed on public view when the Memphis Art Museum opens

Christian Thorsberg

| Daily Correspondent

June 18, 2026 3:15 p.m.

When the Memphis Art Museum opens its massive flagship building to the general public later this 12 months, a particular exhibition will function the inaugural centerpiece: “Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907-1984,” a present devoted to the eponymous Black-owned images studio that documented life within the metropolis’s African American neighborhood throughout a lot of the twentieth century.

Owned and operated by brothers Henry A. Hooks Sr. and Robert B. Hooks, after which by their sons, the enterprise ran from completely different areas throughout the town throughout a lot of the Jim Crow period. While the studio’s portraits included outstanding figures corresponding to educator Booker T. Washington and millionaire Robert R. Church, the vast majority of its frames featured on a regular basis folks celebrating graduations, weddings, sporting occasions and events.

As Rick Rojas wrote for the New York Times in 2025, the Hooks Brothers had been “the go-to photographers of Black life in a city renowned for it.” The studio’s motto, “Where There’s Beauty We Take It, Where There’s None We Make It,” impressed the exhibition’s title, the Art Newspaper’s Benjamin Sutton experiences.

That greater than 150 images from the studio are set to be showcased in a significant gallery as soon as appeared not possible. In 1979, a fireplace destroyed the studio and led to the closure of what had been the second-oldest constantly run African American enterprise in Memphis. Its photographic archives had been hidden away for many years.

Then non-public patrons bought the gathering and donated it to the National Civil Rights Museum and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which is altering its identify to the Memphis Art Museum. That prompted preservationists to start the method of caring for glass plates and aged nitrate movie strips for what would possibly add as much as 75,000 photos.

“It’s just so unique in terms of being such a long-term visual documentation of one community, one city,” Earnestine Jenkins, an artwork historian on the University of Memphis, instructed the Times. “It documents you. It documents your family. It documents your community. It documents your region. It documents Memphis.”

The Memphis Art Museum additionally introduced that its new location will probably be free in perpetuity to residents of Shelby County, which incorporates Memphis and its surrounding suburbs.

“Culture is not something Memphis has. Culture is something Memphis is. And when our culture rises, Memphis rises with it,” Mayor Paul Young says in a statement. “Memphis Art Museum being free for every Memphian, forever, isn’t just a gift—it’s an invitation: to come in, to come back, and to come often.”

Built on the shores of the Mississippi River, the brand new 123,500-square-foot Memphis Art Museum campus is about to open in December. Occupying a full metropolis block, it should boast considerably extra gallery and public house than the earlier location.

Curators are placing this additional house to good use. Joining the “Making Beauty” exhibition are some 19 “short stories” that may “bring works of art into conversation around shared themes, histories, materials, and ideas,” in response to the museum.

Some of those tales embrace “Rhapsodies in Black,” an exhibition devoted to the affect of free jazz on Black American abstractism during the last half-century and “The River Calling: Storytelling in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta,” targeted on folklore, music and mythology within the American South.

“We hope that folks come and park at the museum and have an art experience, go have lunch with one of our restaurant partners downtown, go check out the civil rights museum, go see a show at the Orpheum, and then come back,” Jeff Rhodin, the museum’s chief income officer, instructed Action News 5’s Joyce Peterson and Lydian Coombs in November. “We want it to be a more holistic experience.”